Focusing on Operation Desert Storm, these materials emphasize the perspectives of those directly involved. There are 19 oral history interviews (up to 20 pages each) with eight "decision makers," seven commanders, two Iraqi officials, and two news analysts.

"War Stories" presents the personal reminiscences of five pilots, available in text and audio. "Weapons and Technology" details 10 ground, aircraft, and space weapons systems and munitions. A seven-minute video excerpt from the "Frontline" program is available as well as four 15-minute episodes of a BBC radio program in text and audio. The site includes a chronology, 10 maps, a bibliography, facts and statistics, and brief essays on press coverage and Iraqi war deaths. Links are available to five sites produced to accompany more recent "Frontline" reports on Iraq.

DocsTeach, a National Archives and Records Administration project, recognizes the need to bring primary sources into your classroom. To assist in the effort, NARA has pulled together thousands of primary sources, as well as a selection of pre-made activities and tools for building your own primary-source-centric activities.

Documents offers exactly what it sounds like it would—primary sources. The sources are divided into chronological categories—Revolution and the New Nation, Expansion and Reform, Civil War and Reconstruction, Development of the Industrial United States, Emergence of Modern America, Great Depression and World War II, Postwar United States, and Contemporary United States. Results can then be narrowed further by selecting audio/visual, charts/graphics/data, image, map, or written document. If you prefer, you can use a keyword search. All search results are shown with thumbnails to give you a small preview of the sources for your consideration.

Activities provides pre-made classroom activities. These require access to a computer, and are based on the same tools which the site provides for making your own activities. You can also sort them by historical thinking skill—chronological thinking, comprehension, analysis and interpretation, research capabilities, and issues-analysis and decision-making. Registering gives you access to a much larger collection, many of which are created by other educators. There is no registration cost.

If you're registered, consider making your own activity for use by yourself and others. There are tools which help students to create sequences, participate in analytical discussion, connect documents, geographically map documents, use documents to gain an understanding of the bigger picture, weigh evidence, and examine source context.

Take a moment to peruse the Teacher Resources as well. Here, you can find information on national history standards, using DocsTeach activities in the classroom, Bloom's taxonomy, and the National Council of Social Studies.

Read our Digital Classroom article on DocsTeach for more detailed information on using the site.

This website presents historical sources and teaching materials that address notions of childhood and the experiences of children and youth throughout history and around the world. Primary sources can be found in a database of 200 annotated primary sources, including objects, photographs and paintings, quantitative evidence, and texts, as well as through 50 website reviews covering all regions of the world. More than 20 reviews and more than 70 primary sources relate to North American history.

The website also includes 20 teaching case studies written by experienced educators that model strategies for using primary sources to teach the history of childhood and youth, as well as 10 teaching modules that provide historical context, strategies for teaching with sets of roughly 10 primary sources, and a lesson plan and document-based question. These teaching resources cover topics ranging from the transatlantic slave trade, to girlhood as portrayed in the novel Little Women, to children and human rights. Eight case studies relate to North American history, as do two teaching modules.

The website also includes a useful introductory essay outlining major themes in the history of childhood and youth and addressing the use of primary sources for understanding this history.

Currently provides 22 census data samples and 65 million records from 13 federal censuses covering the period 1850-1990. These data "collectively comprise our richest source of quantitative information on long-term changes in the American population." The project has applied uniform codes to previously published and newly created data samples. Rather than offering data in aggregated tabular form, the site offers data on individuals and households, allowing researchers to tailor tabulations to their specific interests. Includes data on fertility, marriage, immigration, internal migration, work, occupational structure, education, ethnicity, and household composition. Offers extensive documentation on procedures used to transform data and includes 13 links to other census-related sites. A complementary project to provide multiple data samples from every country from the 1960s to 2000 is underway. Currently this international series offers information and interpretive essays on Kenya, Vietnam, Mexico, Hungary, and Brazil. Of major importance for those doing serious research in social history, the site will probably be forbidding to novices.

Offers statistical national economic and financial data in the following 12 categories: interest rates; business/fiscal (including federal debt, receipts and outlays, employment cost index, productivity and cost, and inventories and sales); consumer price indexes; monetary aggregates; commercial banking; employment and population; gross domestic product and components; producer price indexes; exchange rates, balance of payments and trade data; reserves; and daily/weekly financial data. Much of the data was compiled monthly. Periods covered vary according to category; some statistics go back to 1901. Also provides historical and recent statistics for the states of Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, and Tennessee. Useful for those studying business and economic history, and for social historians interested in employment trends.

Provides data from more than 2,500 statistical tables on historical trends in expenditures on research and development (R&D) conducted in the U.S. from 1953-1998 by industrial firms, domestic and foreign-owned. Tables are accessed as downloaded Excel spreadsheets. Data for more recent years, presented under a new coding scheme, can be found in a linked site. Compiled by the National Science Foundation's Annual Survey of Industrial Research and Development. Statistics available include expenditures by industry, size of R&D programs, types of cost, comparison by states, comparison of R&D to net sales by industry, comparison by size of company, federal amounts of R&D, and cost of R&D per scientist and engineer. The site does not contain data for individually specified firms. Provides links to approximately 15 publications and sites on national patterns of R&D resources. Of great value to those studying business history, history of science, and government, in addition to policy makers.

This website offers historians a wealth of data on the economic history of the United States. "Data" is the main section of interest to historians. "Business Cycle Dates" in this section offers a listing of the business cycles that have occurred from 1857 to 2001 that show peaks, troughs, and the duration of the contraction, expansion, and the complete cycle. The database located under "NBER Collection" contains 58 reports under the subject headings of macro data, industry data, international trade data, individual data, hospital data, and patent data. The reports have data and statistics on such topics as inflation; social security; vital statistics on births, marriages, divorces, and deaths; manufacturing; industrial production; and the business cycle. Of particular interest under "individual data" are the Vital Statistics of the United States books for the years between 1937 and 1968. There are also links to 37 other collections of economic data. Useful resources for those studying U.S. economic and business history.

On this site, the Federal Deposit Insurance Company (FDIC) provides information about the history of deposit insurance with a special emphasis on the bank failures of the 1980s and early 1990s. More than 800 pages of text are available in PDF format. Documents include a 76-page history of deposit insurance from the 19th century to the 1990s, a chronology and bibliography of 174 books and articles about the Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s, a listing of 27 government studies of deposit insurance and bank failures, annual statistical information on the banking industry beginning in 1934, and a listing of bank failures from 1991 to 2000. The site provides access to two two-volume studies about what the FDIC and Resolution Trust Corporation learned from the crisis years about the causes of bank failures and how to prevent them in the future. The material is presented in a way that is accessible to non-specialists. Economic and business historians will find the site useful for primary source material, while the site's analytic material might be used in upper-level high school and college courses.

Allows genealogical searching of a number of indexes—with listings of names numbering in the hundreds of millions—created by the Mormon church to assist their members with family history research. Offers guidance and forms useful for conducting genealogical research in many places in the world and census worksheets for the U.S. covering the years 1790–1920, Canada for 1851–1901, and Ireland for 1901–1911.

Also includes links to hundreds of related sites accessible according to category. A good introduction to family history research.

Charts the institutional history of George Mason University from its beginnings in 1949–50 as an adult education extension of the University of Virginia located in northern Virginia, through its formal separation from UVA in 1960, to its present-day existence as a multi-campus university.

Offers more than 30 documents and nearly 50 photographs related to the history, a 400-word biography of George Mason, an annotated chronology, and a current 108-page fact book. Of interest to those studying the history of education and Virginia history.